Category: Issues of the Day

Life will suck if they censor the internet

Much more at the link!

Stop American Censorship

I’ve censored the following, in protest of a bill that gives any corporation and the US government the power to censor the internet–a bill that could pass THIS WEEK. To see the uncensored text, and to stop internet censorship, visit: http://americancensorship.org/posts/13645/uncensor

██████ ██████████ ████ at his █████ ██████ ████ on ████ ████ in ████ at the age of 67. █████████ to the ███████ of ████████, his ████ █████ ██████████ ████: “I ████ ██████ █████. I █████ you for ████ ██████████; but I ████ you to ████ no ████ ███████ █████ me. Let me go off ███████. I ██████ ████ ████.”

Informative graphics from the Congressional Budget Office. Click on the image for a larger version.

Go on, take a look; be an informed citizen.

“Maybe it was always thus, but the relentless wrong-headedness of the Europeans, their insistence on seeing their crisis as something it isn’t, and responding with actions that deepen the real crisis, has been a wonder to behold. In the 1930s policy makers had the excuse of ignorance; there was nobody to explain what was happening. Now, their actions amount to a willful disregard of Econ 101.”

Paul Krugman

From Nov. 2nd to Nov 8th, 2011 we orchestrated the largest ever nationwide poll on the future of the Department of Homeland Security.

Our poll concerned the most pressing question of all: Should DHS be renamed? We provided a list of alternative names and invited the American People to vote for their favorites.  By the end of the polling period, a total of 3,253 people had voted; as respondents were allowed to choose more than one response, a total of 4,064 votes were cast.

See the results — The People have Spoken: Results of Our DHS Poll

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I don’t read The Washington Post, once a great newspaper.

Here’s an illustration why I do not, columnist Ruth Marcus’s Emma Sullivan’s potty-mouthed tweet has a lesson for all of us.

The lede:

“Emma Sullivan, you’re lucky you’re not my daughter. (Dangerous sentence, I know: My daughters might agree.)

“If you were my daughter, you’d be writing that letter apologizing to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for the smart­alecky, potty-mouthed tweet you wrote after meeting with him on a school field trip.”

Ruth Marcus sucks and #sheblowsalot.

One hundred years ago, an American pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville developed a scale to measure the intensity of a pepper’s burn. The scale – as you can see on the widely used chart to the left – puts sweet bell peppers at the zero mark and the blistering habanero at up to 350,000 Scoville Units.

I checked the Scoville Scale for something else yesterday. I was looking for a way to measure the intensity of pepper spray, the kind that police have been using on Occupy protestors including this week’s shocking incident involving peacefully protesting students at the University of California-Davis.

As the chart makes clear, commercial grade pepper spray leaves even the most painful of natural peppers (the Himalayan ghost pepper) far behind. It’s listed at between 2 million and 5.3 million Scoville units. The lower number refers to the kind of pepper spray that you and I might be able to purchase for self-protective uses. And the higher number? It’s the kind of spray that police use, the super-high dose given in the orange-colored spray used at UC-Davis.

Deborah Blum, Scientific American

“All told, that places 100 million people — one in three Americans — either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.”

‘Near Poor’ – Not Quite in Poverty, but Still Struggling – NYTimes.com

Only their tools have improved.

Photo taken at UC Davis.

I know that it’s become the height of unreason now to ask the president to step up and, you know, lead on something, but this is a national problem and it demands a national response. It was only a matter of time before the massive looting of the country’s wealth occasioned a general response from the people whose wealth was looted. Americans are slow and they love their American Idol too much but, when they move, they move. None of this is going away. It’s beyond the mayors of the various cities. If they’re not Michael Bloomberg, who seems to think he masterminded the Normandy campaign in clearing out Zuccotti Park, then they’re paralyzed by the fear and being led around by the nose by their business communities and that their own police department. It would be helpful if the president would mention, in public, that people exercising their fundamental First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly should not be made to bleed from the ears. When did we decide to look at our fellow citizens as enemies who deserve to be subject to military assault? When did we vote on that?

Charles P. Pierce

I like Michael Rosenberg’s column today.

At The Atlantic the longer term reality is discussed — Joe Paterno and the Law.

Now may be the time for remorse and regret — we’ve heard plenty of it already. But it’s also time for JoePa to lawyer up, as it’s now being reported he has. He was fired, presumably for cause, by the university that had employed him since 1950. He is still in clear jeopardy of criminal sanctions by state prosecutors. He has a huge blue-and-white bull’s eye on his back for civil liability from the alleged victims of the assaults and their family members. His reputation is in tatters and his pension presumably is in jeopardy. It is the end of his life as he knew it — just as it was, it must be said, for those poor young boys who were allegedly assaulted.

No matter what ends up happening from here, no matter how much hush money is paid or how many indictments are handed up, the winningest coach in major college football history is likely to spend the next few years, perhaps what’s left of the rest of his life, in and out of courtrooms and lawyer’s offices. There will be no Happy Valley students there to scream his name in adulation. There will be only smart lawyers with good questions demanding answers. For Joe Paterno, the reckoning is at hand.

In fact, over the past decade, growing evidence shows pretty conclusively that social mobility has stalled in this country. Last week, Time magazine’s cover asked, “Can You Still Move Up in America?” The answer, citing a series of academic studies was, no; not as much as you could in the past and — most devastatingly — not as much as you can in Europe.

The most comprehensive comparative study, done last year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, found that “upward mobility from the bottom” — Daniels’s definition — was significantly lower in the United States than in most major European countries, including Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark. Another study, by the Institute for the Study of Labor in Germany in 2006, uses other metrics and concludes that “the U.S. appears to be exceptional in having less rather than more upward mobility.”

A 2010 Economic Mobility Project study found that in almost every respect, the United States has a more rigid socioeconomic class structure than Canada. …

From a column by Fareed Zakaria.

Recommended reading. Scott Ostler on Penn State.

“To Paterno’s supporters, those of us who called for and then praised his firing are a braying mob of self-righteous haters using vague information to ruin a good man. I can live with that.”

Coach Sandusky was investigated for inappropriate conduct with a child in 1998 while still a coach at Penn State. Are we to believe Joe Paterno didn’t know this? And that no alarm bells were set off in 2002 when the new incident was reported to him.

This is only going to get worse.

“There’s been a lot said in the last couple of days about how these revelations have tarnished Mr. Paterno’s successes as a coach. That’s kind of beside the point, isn’t it?”

Andrew Rosenthal

Maureen Dowd sums it up.

You should read Paul Myerberg’s take on Penn State.

I have three thoughts.

1. These men, however heinous the crimes, are under our system of justice innocent until proven guilty.

2. Even so, Coach Paterno should resign. Now. Today. And no Penn State fan should attend a game until he does. Zero tolerance for cover ups.

3. I’ll wager the men involved are feeling sorry for themselves for being indicted and feeling sorry for what they have done to Coach Paterno and feeling sorry for what they have brought on Penn State. And I’ll further wager that they haven’t given a thought to the victims.

At some point in the coming weeks, Joe Paterno is gonna step down as the head coach at Penn State, and the reason why is because there’s no possible way to reconcile the statement he issued yesterday with the details from the grand jury report that say, specifically, that Peterno was told that Jerry Sandusky did things of a “sexual nature” to a child. I would say the use of terms like “child” and “sexual nature” are specific enough. Paterno is going to be allowed the chance to resign with some semblance of dignity, probably before the team’s bowl game. And the oblivious sack of shit currently serving as PSU president will get the boot as well. This whole PSU thing is less an indictment of college football than it is an indictment of all entrenched adult institutions. From big-time college football to the Catholic church to Wall Street to government agencies, you’ll find that people almost always choose to cover their ass and protect their jobs (and friends) rather than do the right thing.

Drew Magary beginning a piece at Deadspin.

What happened to the money?

I remember trying to close the Port of Oakland as part of a protest once upon a time about 40 years ago.

“Earlier this year, Chick-fil-A became embroiled in a controversy surrounding its donations to anti-gay groups. Though Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy denied having an ‘agenda against anyone,’ an Equality Matters investigation discovered that Chick-fil-A donated more than $1 million to anti-gay causes between 2003 and 2008. Now, new IRS 990 forms reveal that the company donated nearly two million dollars to anti-gay groups in 2009 alone, the most recent year for which public records are available.”

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